Tuesday, May 20, 2014

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has just announced
that more than 400,000 high-resolution digital images of public domain
works in the Museum’s world-renowned collection may be downloaded
directly from the Museum’s website for non-commercial use. The images can be used at no charge, without getting permission
from the museum. In making this announcement, the Met joined other
world-class museums in putting put large troves of digital art online.

To nominate just one example, The Steerage, made in 1907 by Alfred Steiglitz is available, complete with a detailed description of the work.

As proprietor of the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession and
publisher of the photographic journals Camera Notes and Camera Work,
Alfred Stieglitz was a major force in the promotion and elevation of
photography as a fine art in America in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. The Steerage is considered Stieglitz's signature
work, and was proclaimed by the artist and illustrated in histories of
the medium as his first "modernist" photograph. It marks Stieglitz's
transition away from painterly prints of Symbolist subjects to a more
straightforward depiction of quotidian life.

The Steerage began
its life as a masterpiece four years after its creation, with
Stieglitz's publication of it in a 1911 issue of Camera Work devoted
exclusively to his photographs in the "new" style, together with a
Cubist drawing by Picasso. Stieglitz loved to recount how the great
painter had praised the collagelike dispersal of forms and shifting
depths of The Steerage. Canonized retroactively, the photograph allowed
Stieglitz to put his chosen medium on par with the experimental European
painting and sculpture he imported and exhibited so presciently at his
gallery. In 1915, he lavishly reprinted the image in large-scale
photogravure on both vellum and japanese paper for inclusion in his last
magazine, 291.

About Me

My pictures explore the strange anthropology of cities. The unusual and overlooked in the human landscape.
I am asking the viewer to question the idea that photographs as documents are complete representations of subject.
I'm interested in the universality of life and the idea of parallel lives - when one thing is happening here, something else is happening over there. The democracy of non-places fascinates me, in the knowledge that inevitably nothing is as it seems.
I work and live between Auckland and Paris.
http://harveybenge.com/
email:harvey.benge@xtra.co.nz